Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US got off to a happy start with retail giant Amazon declaring it wants to keep investing and expanding in India.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos took to social media site Twitter to express his enthusiasm and optimism after his meeting with Modi. With tech playing centre-stage in Modi’s US visit, Bezos was one of the 20 US business chiefs who interacted with Modi on Sunday. Other bigwigs included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Apple CEO Tim Cook, who have all been eyeing expansion in India.
Terrific meeting with @narendramodi. Always impressed, energized by optimism and invention in India. Excited to keep investing and growing. https://t.co/xhQ58dik3y
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) June 25, 2017
Amazon completes four years of business in India and is a key e-commerce player in the industry. According to an article in the Business Standard, the firm has committed to investing $5 billion in the country. Amazon claims that half of its investments in the country have been focused on building infrastructure.
“We don’t really hold ourselves back based on a targeted investment. We will require a lot of investment, as will Indian e-commerce. It is still very early and we should be ready to invest for many years,” Amit Agarwal, Amazon vice president and country manager, India, had told Business Standard in a recent interview.
Amazon has invested over $1 billion in India during 2016-17, say experts. They reckon that the rate of investment will only step up considering the fact that Amazon’s Indian rival Flipkart has finally landed long-term investors, and Chinese rival Alibaba has also been boosting its sales in India.
Although e-commerce in India witnessed a slowdown last year, Amazon claims it has had a healthy growth. The company claims to have recorded 85 per cent business growth in the first quarter as compared to last year. Agarwal foresees a double-digit growth rate for the Indian market. “The reason I think we’re still growing at this pace is that customers are shopping more, ‘Prime’ members are spending more, new customers continue to come to us. Amazon.com at its current scale is still growing at a rate of over 30 per cent, and the US market is 100 times bigger than India. Here, it’s so early that I foresee double-digit growth for many more years to come,” he said.
